What does the Year of the Ox mean for biz?

Or not, according to the Associated Press, which reports that the Year of the Ox will be a bad one for business.

Chinese fortune tellers sound a lot like economists, with predictions of recession, mounting job losses and a tanking stock market. But they one up the economists with predictions of earthquakes and international tensions, too.

The ox symbolizes “hard work, resolve and tenacity,” the report says.

Incidentally, President Obama was born in 1961, another Year of the Ox.

But the Associated Press reports that this isn’t much help, because he “is taking office in a particularly bad year for his Chinese astrological sign. The ox sign is in direct conflict this year with a traditional Chinese divinity called the ‘God of Year,’ considered a bad omen.”